Modern wielders of power show dark downside of technology age
Soon I am to don a suit and drive into town and take part in the Christchurch Book Festival, but I have just checked the schedule and discovered it isn’t a Book Festival. It’s a Writers and Readers Festival which isn’t as good because: a) it’s longer b) it lacks apostrophes c) if it had the apostrophes they’d be in the wrong place
d) if they were in the right place it would look prissy, and
e) it fails to mention books which are the whole point of the festival. Or should be.
As I have no doubt said before, I like books. And though I have sometimes pretended otherwise, I don’t like the electric things that purport to be books. I so much don’t like them that when I am on a plane that is coming in to land I make a point of holding my book a little higher so that I can be seen to be still reading by those who’ve had to switch off their electric books.
Quite what threat an electric book poses to a 300-seater aeroplane I have no idea and I doubt that the aviation authorities have either, but good on them for inconveniencing the users of electric books and long may it continue.
The point that seems to have got lost is that we don’t have to go along with any new technology. It is not compulsory. I forget which eminent philosopher it was who held that the joy experienced on any given day increases in direct proportion to the number of Apple devices stamped on, and I am wondering whether it might by some extraordinary coincidence have been me, but if it was, then boy, was I on good form when I said it.
For despite the barrage of propaganda to the contrary, better technology does not necessarily mean better lives. The opposite is just as likely. Two-hundred years ago Wordsworth felt that the world was too much with us. What would he feel now with 24-hour news channels, the blitz of emails, Twitterpuke, Linkedinpuke, limitless pornography available to every 10-year-old with a computer, which means every 10-year-
The upshot of all this is that money and power have dropped into the laps of a few unelected technowhizzes.
old, and, worst of all, Facebloodybook?
(And while I’m at it, how dare that T-shirted child billionaire Zuckerschmuck appropriate the word ‘‘book’’ when naming his loathsome invention? His medium for bragging and fibbing employs the vocabularial complexity of a 4-year-old on Ritalin: like this, unlike that; friend this, unfriend that. Ha. Get thee to kindergarten, Zuckerschmuck, and roll in your dollar pit. Leave books and the bright and sapid world to us grown-ups).
And just as better technology doesn’t make lives better, it doesn’t make people better. Nor, of course, does it make them worse, but it does enable the bad in people more than it enables the good. For every hand across the water that technology makes possible there are a dozen school girls bullied by night as well as by day. Or a child is molested because there’s an online audience of sickos who will pay to watch, or a journalist beheaded because now we can so easily show the world. Or the vile Cameron Slater finds to even his own astonishment that he has readers.
The upshot of all this is that money and power have dropped into the laps of a few unelected technowhizzes. And they will wield that money and power precisely as people have always wielded money and power.
Don’t be fooled for one minute by Google’s typical new-age Silicon Valley slogan ‘‘Don’t be evil’’. If the slogan’s addressing customers, it’s impertinent. If it’s addressing the company, well, no one says ‘‘don’t be evil’’ unless the possibility of being evil has crossed his or her mind. Google’s exactly as nice a billionaire as you would be.
Or Kim Dotcom. At first I thought he was all right and said so but now I don’t. I obviously don’t object to his fat or his Germanness, or, though I have to work a bit harder on this one, his dress sense, but I do object to his vendetta politics. And I object to his having hacked into a German prime minister’s credit rating because he didn’t like the prime minister.
But most of all I object to his boasting about the crime 19 years later, rather than going down on his obesity-buggered knees and moaning, ‘‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Forgive me because I was young and I knew not what I did but now I do and in acknowledgment of my guilt I am donating my Hummers to charity and in shriven Hummerlessness I shall withdraw into my newly offline mansion and grow wise by reading books.’’
Enough. I’m off to festivate.